guys, sorry if i sounded a little whiny last night. guess i was in a bit of a funk.

my reasons in short form.

i thought when we went in to iraq that the timing might be off. why not just do what we had been doing and make sure that saddam was contained. i knew that our military was depleted and wondered if we could fight on two fronts.

-what i did not know at the time was how very hard it is to fight in afghanistan. after some study of the many past wars in that county and after info from my brother who has been there going on 3 years now, i realize that trying to fight jihadists in afghanistan is a losing proposition. it would be the same in pakistan. the conclusion i have drawn is that you must either leave the area to them, or draw them out. jihadists-not to be confused with the taliban-a whole other problem.

-now that we know about the scope of the OFF dealings, there was no hope of containing the ambitions of saddam. he had access to anything he wanted, and the countries that supplied him were agitating for the lifting of sanctions. had that happened, there would have been no controls, not even the useless inspections from the UN.

-the reason the 60 min. special was not adopted and advertised by the left was that the interrogator said that saddam had told him that he (saddam) had kept the means and personnel to restart his WMD program and that he had every intention of doing so. if you are going to believe him when he says he destroyed his WMD, you must also believe that he intended to restart his programs. this info has also been given to us by scientists and others from iraq.

-how does an incoming administration gather intel? they do not fire everyone in the intel business and toss out all of their work. they take the intel that is available and they use it, and build on it. the clinton admin believed that saddam had WMD. it was a combination of their intel and international intel that caused BC to bomb iraq and to make regime change in iraq our official policy. having been given this intel, having just been attacked, having had the inspections fail again, and with evidence that WMD material was still unaccounted for in iraq, it was reasonable to take saddam out.

i will not say that i think things were done as well as they could have been. many mistakes were made. at this point, we would be foolish not to finish what we started. i did desert storm. we did not finish the job. my kids are doing this war. i do not want my grandkids going back because we once again did not do the job. i also do not want to hear another jihadist listing our failures and acts of cowardice and ending the list with this war.

as for the anti-war folks. i don't care if you are anti-war. there has never been a war that has not been protested. please do not use the excuse of our military dead to do it. do not list our numbers, or say that you do it for us. that is disingenuous, especially when there is no draft. we do what we do because it is our choice. we do it even for you. if you do not march in the street against the death of extreme skiers, or kids killed street racing, or the morbidly obese who have eaten their way into diabetes and have parts chopped off, do not claim to march for us. be honest. you don't like war.

off my box....funk lifted :-)

Logged

.....The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved.....

there is a very good book. the author was neither a bush fan, nor a supporter of the war. he does write the most detailed history of saddams iraq that i have ever read. he backs his assertions and opinions with a great deal of source material and references. i read this about 3 years ago and decided that sometimes, for the sake of a good nights sleep, it's better not to know some things. some of the info that has come out of iraq since this book was written, in particular some of the documents that were released before they put a stop to it all, back up what he has written.

.....The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved.....